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Former Las Vegas News Bureau photographer Don English sits on a wooden bench this month at News Nob located at the Nevada Test Site. He holds a photo he took from the same spot of an atmospheric nuclear test in 1952. Below is his widely published photo of a mushroom cloud behind downtown Las Vegas in November 1951.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
Photo by DON ENGLISH/ LAS VEGAS NEWS BUREAU
Nuclear testing pioneer Al O'Donnell witnessed the first nuclear test in Nevada, the Able, shot on Jan. 27, 1951. He recalled the early days of atmospheric nuclear testing last month with a pile of photos of fireballs and mushroom clouds spread on a patio table at his Henderson home.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
Nuclear testing veteran Ernie Williams walks in front of a row of railroad bridge girders that sustained a nuclear blast in 1957.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
Former Energy Department Defense Chief Troy Wade explains how he assembled the nuclear device "with my own two hands" that blasted the Sedan Crater at the Nevada Test Site in 1962.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
Graphic by Mike Johnson.
OFFICIALS TO MARK ANNIVERSARY
Nevada lawmakers on Monday will join officials from the Department of Energy, the Desert Research Institute and the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation to dedicate an institute on the role of atomic testing in Nevada.
The ceremony marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of a top secret document by President Truman that established the test site on Dec. 18, 1950.
The foundation, DOE and the institute will jointly fund and operate the museum out of a $10 million, 60,000-square-foot building to be built at the institute's facility on Flamingo Road. Construction will begin next year with an opening date targeted for mid-2002, according to Troy Wade, the foundation's chairman and master of ceremonies at Monday's noon dedication.
"It's kind of a big deal. I'm really excited about it," Wade said.
He said because of the nonprofit foundation's effort, the Nevada Atomic Testing History Institute has secured affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. This, he said, adds to the foundation's stature, "and will help us in our mission to preserve the test site's history as part of the nation's heritage."
An agreement this year allows the entities to exchange objects of historical significance for exhibits and displays on the Cold War.
When built, Wade said, the building will house an archaeological collection from Desert Research Institute -- the research arm of the University of Nevada system -- in addition to radiation records.
Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, both D-Nev., along with Desert Research Institute President Stephen Wells and Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt will be among the guests and speakers at Monday's event.
-- KEITH ROGERS/REVIEW-JOURNAL
Related Story
The Test of Time
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Sunday, December 17, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
'We Were in Awe'
50 years ago Monday, Nevada became ground zero in the Cold War
By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Through a pair of goggles as thick as a windshield and dark enough to make the midday sun look like a glowing candle, 28-year-old Al O'Donnell watched the explosion that launched the Atomic Age in Nevada.
As a field engineer for a Boston-based government contractor, he stood with other scientists on a knoll overlooking Frenchman Flat -- a desolate high-desert basin home to jackrabbits and wild horses.
It was finger-numbing cold on that January dawn a half-century ago, more than a month after President Truman on Dec. 18, 1950, signed the "top secret" memorandum that made a 680-square-mile swath of Nevada the nation's continental site for testing nuclear weapons.
In an interview at his Henderson home, O'Donnell, now 78, recalled the anxiety of that first atomic test in Nevada, code-named Able. The atmospheric shot involved dropping a 1,000-pound bomb out of the bay doors of a B-50 airplane some 3 1/2 miles above ground.
"The first thing going through my mind was I hope that the bombardier knows where ground zero is," he said. "Then you sit and wait for the heat and the shock wave. You hold on to each other."
O'Donnell was, at times, the man who pushed the button that triggered the countdowns for bombs dropped from 750-foot-high towers. Sometimes, they were tethered to large balloons for detonation.
At the right moment, electrical charges would be unleashed, detonating explosives that slammed hunks of plutonium or uranium together, causing nuclear chain-reactions. The results were the fireballs that turned into mushroom clouds suspended over the terrain 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The land regarded for thousands of years by Western Shoshone as "Newe Sogobia" -- or land of the "people of Mother Earth" -- 50 years ago Monday officially became the place where the United States, concerned about the escalation of the Korean War, would begin a historic program that would make Nevada a focal point of the world's arms race.
It became an area where mock towns would be set up, only to be blasted into dust, where some of the largest man-made craters would be formed and some of the world's deepest shafts cut, where some of the largest and most spirited nuclear protests would be held, where some of the nation's most futuristic technology would be tried out, and where some of the most deadly poisons would be released.
Five decades later, O'Donnell is understated about the time he spent watching explosions that were much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II.
"The energy," he said, "is tremendous."
Historians say Truman, in his decision to create the test site, wanted to move much of the nation's testing from the Pacific to Nevada to cut down on distance and wartime risk involved with conducting nuclear experiments away from the continent.
With advice from a special National Security Council panel, Truman chose the Nye County site -- at the time the Air Force's Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range -- over three other locations: Dugway, Utah; White Sands, N.M.; and Camp Lejeune, N.C.
The Nevada Test Site, so dubbed on Dec. 31, 1954, was doubled in area in 1958 to 1,350 square miles, its current size.
The government's strategy, as O'Donnell described it, was to use Nevada to test the smaller fission bombs that would be used to detonate much more powerful hydrogen bombs. These H-bombs would be demonstrated in the wider expanse of the South Pacific. The 1-kiloton Able, shot at 5:44 a.m. on Jan. 27, 1951, was small in comparison to the multikiloton blasts he had seen years earlier in the Pacific, and the megaton-range shots that he would observe a few years later.
"We came here to Nevada with the understanding there wouldn't be any megaton shooting. It was all kiloton," said O'Donnell, who came to Las Vegas as a scout for EG&G Inc., the company hired by the Atomic Energy Commission to arm, fire and record data for nuclear bombs.
But from the U.S. perspective, the Cold War mentality to beat the Soviet Union to developing the most exotic, powerful bomb was gaining momentum, and the megaton blasts would eventually be used. Steering the arms race for the United States were two physicists, Robert J. Oppenheimer of the Los Alamos, N.M., national laboratory and Edward Teller, co-founder of the radiation laboratory in Livermore, Calif., now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
"Dr. Oppenheimer was content with developing the splitting of the atom for energy, and Dr. Teller wanted to go beyond that. He got into fusion, the fusing of atoms rather than the splitting to create greater energy," according to O'Donnell, himself a veteran of the Manhattan Project.
For the barrage of atomic-bomb shots in the 1950s, reporters and photographers from major news organizations worldwide would converge at the foot of a hill on the edge of Yucca Flat, seven miles from ground zero.
"We were in awe," explained former Las Vegas News Bureau photographer Don English. "It was an awesome, ethereal sight."
English snapped the famous photo of a distant mushroom cloud as seen from downtown behind the "Vegas Vic" cowboy sign. But when he was at the test site's observation area, a place known as News Nob, English said the intensity of the white flash and rapidly changing light baffled photographers, who had to look away to avoid eye damage.
"Everybody was really concerned about getting the picture," he said. "I don't recall anyone being scared."
There were times when people would drive to an overlook at Mount Charleston to watch the tests and take photographs, only to be warned by authorities not to look directly at the blasts. In downtown Las Vegas on Main Street a signal light was positioned above a building to let people know a test was about to occur. A blue light meant the shot would take place and red light signaled the test had been called off, usually because of weather conditions.
The force of the bombs coupled with certain atmospheric conditions sometimes surprised scientists. Windows were occasionally blasted out on Fremont Street. One shot ignited creosote bushes around Yucca Flat, forming a ring of fire.
From 1951 through 1962, 100 nuclear bombs were detonated in the atmosphere at the test site.
In a 1957 test, ranchers in South Dakota complained that radioactive materials were carried by a weather system 850 miles from the test site, raining out as pink hail on their ranches and killing their livestock.
Some of the areas hardest hit by fallout were in Nevada downwind of the test site, St. George, Utah, and parts of northern Arizona.
So-called "downwinders" who developed radiation-related cancers would wait up to 30 years to become eligible for government compensation. From 1951 through 1955, Army troops conducted maneuvers within seven miles of the blasts.
With President Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev edging toward a bilateral moratorium, U.S. scientists set out to perfect below-ground testing, having succeeded in containing a nuclear blast in a tunnel in 1957.
A year later, Troy Wade, then 24, was a miner in charge of a tunnel-digging shift.
"The international politics was such that people knew that continuing to test in the atmosphere was adding to global fallout," Wade explained.
Scientists, however, debated whether restricting tests to below-ground was a good idea. "Some felt if we went underground we wouldn't be able to get all the information, but it turned out it was the opposite. We had a lot more control over the experiment," he said. Wade, who eventually became the Energy Department's defense chief, remembers the silence that hung over the test site during the moratorium that began Nov. 1, 1958.
During the lull, "the test site manpower was going down rapidly. That all ended in 1961, when the Soviets abrogated the treaty," he said.
What followed was the most intense period of the Cold War, one that turned the respective test sites of the two superpowers into battlegrounds for the deterrence policy known as Mutually Assured Destruction. The policy resulted in large stockpiles of all types of nuclear bombs in both countries. No leader would ever think lightly about using one, should much of the world be destroyed.
"They shot off more than 50 in six months," Wade recalled about the round of full-scale tests the Soviets had secretly prepared during the moratorium. "They caught us technically, and we really never got much back ahead."
Testing in the open air ceased with the signing of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, driven by international concerns of the effects of global fallout. The treaty prohibited tests in the atmosphere, outer space and under water.
That's when O'Donnell decided to get out of the business.
"It lost its thrill," he said. "In atmospheric tests you can see what's happening, the fireball, the stem, you can see the earth being sucked up."
Though subsidence craters from below ground tests -- hundreds of which still pock mark the terrain -- were not as thrilling as fireballs and mushroom clouds, the data generated about the behavior of radioactive materials and force of the explosion gave scientists much to ponder. From these tests, they learned how to fine-tune weapons, making them more adaptable for accurate delivery to their targets.
Wade directed some of the first cratering experiments in the Plowshare Program, a plan that sought to use nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes, such as cutting canals in remote areas. In 1962, using a device that Wade says he personally assembled, scientists blasted a large, now well-photographed divot known as the Sedan Crater.
The purpose of the Sedan test was to demonstrate whether a nuclear bomb could be used to excavate a harbor off the Australian coast so ships could reach untapped iron ore deposits. In the 1960s, Los Angeles County inquired about using nuclear devices to carve out mountain passes similar to the Cajon Pass in San Bernardino County.
There is no simple way to explain the hundreds of different below-ground tests, said Nick Aquilina, who came to the test site in 1962 and ended up managing it at the end of the Cold War in 1989 when employment peaked at 11,000 workers and the budget reached $1.4 billion.
Some, such as tunnel tests, were geared toward understanding whether military hardware could survive radiation exposure from a detonation in outer space. Others were aimed at checking the reliability of warheads in the stockpile.
"A lot were engineering-related to study size and weight. The Navy had great considerations on weight with the Trident missile," he said, referring to the challenge scientists had in making the missile and its warheads compatible.
Scientists conducted below-ground tests by drilling large holes -- sometimes 7 feet wide and 2,000 feet deep. A nuclear device was placed near the bottom of each shaft, topped by a 200-foot-tall diagnostics canister and backfill.
As testing continued through the 1970s, diplomats sought to limit the yield of all tests to no more than 150 kilotons, putting more emphasis on a bomb's accuracy than yield.
In 1974, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a 150-kiloton cap on all nuclear tests, which still allowed for detonations roughly eight times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The largest test at the facility was the below-ground detonation, Boxcar, 1.3 megatons, in 1968.
Though limited, the later tests were still powerful enough to shake tall buildings in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s and 1980s. For safety reasons, many tests were announced in advance to avoid startling people, and keep workers, such as window-washers, from being jarred off buildings at the time of an explosion.
As the testing program matured, emphasis shifted to so-called "Star Wars" research, which included a proposal for a laser weapon that could direct intense X-ray beams powered with the force of a nuclear bomb to incinerate missiles in space.
Although the X-ray laser never became a reality, it challenged the Soviet Union financially to keep up with development of advanced U.S. weapons.
The Cold War began to thaw in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall fell. In disbelief to many U.S. Cold War warriors, Soviet scientists came to the Nevada Test Site to participate in a treaty verification experiment, Kearsarge, detonated on Aug. 17, 1988. A similar joint test was conducted the next month in the Soviet Union.
From May 1991 through the last full-scale U.S. test in September 1992, a team of Russian scientists lived at the test site to carry out on-site verification.
Ernie Williams, a veteran of the U.S. nuclear weapons program from 1951 to 1986, was called on to host the Russians. Williams, who now gives tours of the test site, had worked as an engineer and was a front man for providing facilities -- "making camp," he said -- for as many as 4,000 support personnel for tests in the South Pacific.
He arranged during scientists' off hours to escort them to places they had read about -- Disneyland, the Pacific Ocean. The Russians were equally enthusiastic about Las Vegas. "They loved to go to Target, Sam's Club and Wal-Mart. They couldn't believe the first grocery store they saw," Williams recalled.
"When the Soviet Union came here, a lot of curtains were torn down," Aquilina said.
The last U.S. test, Divider, was conducted on Sept. 23, 1992, beginning a moratorium that has been extended indefinitely.
The technology race ended the Cold War, Wade said.
"One of the reasons their economy fell apart was that they spent too much on the military. We just flat-ass outspent them," he said.
Aquilina agreed. "The irony is the success over the 42-year program directly led to the ability to stop the program and maintain our leadership role in world security."
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